Huw Warren (piano)Recorded at Cardiff University Concert Hall, no date givenWelsh pianist and composer, formerly co- leader of the group `Perfect Houseplants` and a participant in the highly regarded cross genre ECM album `Quercus` is well versed in many musical forms and has pursued an international career which has brought him into contact and collaboration with a diversity of artistes. His field might be broadly described as jazz oriented world and folk music but as he demonstrates in this solo piano recital he is possessed of a formidable technique born of grounding in the classical repertoire. His recital consists of twelve pieces of which all but two are of his own creation, reflecting his musical influences, the remembrance of lost friends and a love of his native landscape. To call it a musical scrapbook would be demeaning but it is very much a personal statement and one that we may feel privileged to have access.

He begins with a powerful rendition of Hermeto Pascoal’s `O Farol Que Nos Guia` (Our Guiding Light) in which he contrives to infuse the Brazilian melody with rolling tremelando passages of increasing menace suggestive of the brooding mountains and lowering skies of the Welsh landscape. He follows this darkly etched tone poem with `Against the Odds` an original piece which acknowledges his interest in South American music; it is a bright optimistic piece with an attractive hook riding along on a sprightly Cascara rhythm. The mood changes again with a spectral piece which takes its title from Michael Faber’s philosophical sci-fi novel `The Book of Strange New Things`, its ethereal harmonics depicting the alien landscape and the inscrutable faces of its inhabitants. Returning to the more familiar ground of the Welsh Marches he gives us a sound portrait of Edward Elgar in a jaunty theme recalling Ken Russell’s famous TV film about the composer which shows him as a boy riding in the Malvern Hills. Other sound portraits reflect upon Dylan Thomas’s poem `Fernhill`, an uplifting `lilting and carefree` theme that captures the ethos of the verse to perfection whilst `Dinorwig Dreams` summons up visions of the once thriving slate quarry near Llanberis in a bustling ostinato before subsidising into a forlorn threnody of decline.

Powerful repetitive phrasing of an almost industrial ferocity is to be found in `Onwards and Sideways`, a piece that reminded me of Lennie Tristano’s tumultuous `Descent into the Maelstrom` but it’s not all storm and stress and some of the most elegiac and affecting moments come with pieces that pay homage to the memory of departed friends, on the one hand John Taylor, who as a pianist and composer also gave us musical accounts of his favourite rural landscapes, and the other , Jeremy Lamburn, a highly regarded cellist from Lancashire.

Inevitably in recitals of this type there is a Bach transcription; in this case it is the Prelude No 8 in E-flat minor (BWV 853) from The Well-Tempered Clavier, which after a chiming pedal note reminiscent of Milt Jackson’s vibe sound and some rubato musing of an MJQ variety proceeds to soften the baroque precision of original piece with some languid romanticism of a Chopinesque flavour , an influence also present in his final selection `Noturno`, bringing to a close a brilliantly conceived and executed collection of pieces that reveal the recitalist’s musical character in a way that remains indelible long after the final note has sounded.